Devil Red (19 page)

66

I had only gone a few feet when I found a dead Doberman. It lay just inside the shadow of the trees, right before they broke and there was that space between them and the house.

I bent down and touched it. It was warm, and it was bloody. Bending over, I clicked on my headlight and took a look. A bullet most likely. Right through the front right chest. From the way the ground looked, the snow creased and bloody, I knew the dog had dragged itself here and died.

I clicked off the light, sat there thinking.

A thought crossed my mind. One I couldn’t hold on to with any conviction, but it was there. I decided to let it go, and to move on. I hadn’t come this far to turn around and go back over the wall.

I moved to the end of the trees, stopped, and bent down and studied the gap between where I was and the veranda. As Vanilla had said, it was well lit, except right at the corner closest to me. Presumably, if what Vanilla knew about the place was the same, there wasn’t an angle there that accommodated a camera. All I had to do was make a straight run into the shadows, and then, if she was right, pull myself into an indention in the wall and gather my wits, which might take a lot more time than I had available. After that, I had to move quickly, and then it was assholes, elbows, and hot ammunition.

I was about to lunge forward, and then I saw him.

He was just to the front of the veranda. A big man. A very big man. Lying on the snow-covered lawn. A rifle of some sort lay on the snow beside him. I had an idea he hadn’t stopped to put his ear to the ground to hear the sweet vibrations of the earth. He was one of the bodyguards, and I was more than certain he was as dead as Abraham Lincoln; and if not, he was close enough to being dead to see Lincoln’s ghost. Like with the Doberman, the snow around him was coated red.

I went across the stretch and made the edge of the veranda, and slid up against the wall. The dark indention was there, as Vanilla said. I slipped into it and caught my breath. I didn’t know for a fact that the trees and that space between them to the veranda was in a camera blind, or even that I was in one now, but I had to play it that way.

I took the wire snips out of my coat pocket, and turned to where I was supposed to be able to reach through a gap and cut a wire that hooked to the camera, and another that hooked to the alarms. Snapping on my headlight, I saw there was indeed a gap, and that it was some sort of flaw in design. The concrete should have come together in that spot, but it didn’t. I could get my hand in there, inside a large storage room, and flip open the little metal door that held the alarm system without any trouble, but when I flicked it open with the tip of the wire snips, the wires were already cut. I snapped off the headlight. I pulled out Brett’s little revolver and moved along the veranda wall as far away from the lights as possible.

I came to the door lock Vanilla said I’d have to pick, and as I figured, the door was already cracked open.

I slipped in, held the revolver at the ready with two hands. I didn’t always shoot with two hands. I had learned to shoot the Wild West way when I was a kid, and I never dropped it completely. It’s not as accurate, but I can hit pretty much what I shoot at, provided it’s in range and not moving too damn fast.

It was dark inside the house and I couldn’t tell where I was going at first, so I just squatted down and let my eyes adjust to the shadows. I didn’t turn on the little head-beam light, knowing if I did, all I was doing was giving them a little spot target on my forehead. I squatted there with my back against a wall trying not to breathe too loud. After a few minutes I could see better in the dark, make out shapes. It was all furniture as far as I could tell. Rising up, I moved across the floor with the revolver at the ready.

I stopped when a voice said, “Don’t move.”

67

“Jesus Christ, Vanilla,” I said. “You damn near made me mess myself.”

“Better than a bullet in the head,” she said. “Be quiet.”

She took me by the sleeve and pulled me over to a space behind a stack of boxes.

“Why?” I said.

“Now’s not the time,” she said. “I decided to go in with you, and right now, that’s all you need to know. My take is if they have one dog outside, now dead, there might be one inside. They used to always have two. My other take is the guy in the yard isn’t the only one. He was making the perimeter as I arrived. He didn’t see me, but I decided it was best he go. It’s best they all go.”

“How many is all?” I said.

“We’ll determine that as we continue. This storage room leads into a large room. The training room. That’ll be our first stop. And good luck. You’ll need it.”

“Thanks for boosting my spirits.”

“Put the pistol in your pocket, and use the shotgun. Go for heavy firepower if that’s what you got.”

We went out from behind the boxes and across the room, Vanilla leading the way. She moved smooth and silent as a ghost, and when we came to the double-wide doors that led into the big room beyond, we could see light through the cracks and at the bottom of it.

Vanilla spoke so that I could hardly hear her: “Ready.”

“Yes,” I said.

She grabbed the door handle and turned it briskly and threw the door wide. There was a guy in there, a big guy, blond-headed, handsome like a movie star. But unlike a movie star he had a real gun and it was in a shoulder holster. He was sitting at a table with a deck of cards in his hands. When the door popped back, his head snapped around, and when he saw us standing there, he turned in his chair and went for his gun, and while I was still trying to lift mine, Vanilla shot him. Her gun coughed through the silencer, like a patient in a doctor’s office with a finger up his ass. The man in the chair fell back and his feet went up and a spray of blood went up with him. In that moment, a man, the dead man’s card-playing partner, came out of a small room off to the side, zipping up his pants. He saw us. Vanilla shot him through the chest while he still had hold of his zipper.

She stopped by the man who had been in the chair and looked at him. He wasn’t going to wake up and brush himself off. She went over to the other, and I followed after, like a puppy learning from a smarter dog. The man on the floor moaned once, opened one eye, and looked at her. She shot him through the head.

The rest of it was like a bad dream. We cruised quickly across the floor and to the double doors across the way, and Vanilla opened them without hesitation, not loudly, but not like she was still being sneaky. As she opened it, the sounds of popping hit our ears briskly. A moment later, I knew the source of the sounds.

We had stepped into it up to our necks.

It was a large long room, and there were targets at the far end, and there were four shooters taking practice on them. Three men and a woman, all young. When we stepped into the room, they turned.

And so did their guns.

I moved left and Vanilla moved right. I cut down with the shotgun and blasted the girl in her middle. She went back and down and her gun went sliding across the floor. There were two coughs to my right and two men dropped, and I let loose with the twelve-gauge again, and the last man lost his face.

“We’ve made enough noise,” Vanilla said, “so from here on out, it has to happen fast.”

There was a hallway, and it oddly split left and right. She went right without saying a word to me, walking very fast in her sensible shoes. I went left, walking less fast in one of the two pairs of shoes I owned.

I walked with the gun before me. The hallway was narrow and the walls were drab olive, or appeared that way in the near dark. There was some light from little runners near the floor. The hall went on for a long time and then it curved ever so slightly. Eventually, the hall opened up into a circular room. The room was dimly lit and there were martial arts mats on the floor. There were more mats stacked to one side, about five feet high, and across the way was an open door.

A young woman, perhaps twenty, came through the door at a rapid walk. Her long hair was tied back and looked orange in the light. She had on a bulky sweatshirt and sweatpants. She had a gun by her side. She was obviously on a mission, and that mission was me. That shotgun of mine had made so much noise I might as well have been a one-man band.

She lifted her gun with calm deliberation and fired. I was already moving, but the hair on the left side of my head fanned a little. The bullet couldn’t have missed me by more than a micro fragment. It made a sound softer than Vanilla’s gun; it too was silenced. I fired twice, quickly, as I dodged, the reverberation of the shotgun loud in the room.

But she was moving too. She moved like Vanilla moved. Both my shots missed, and as she fired again, I rolled, hit the matted floor, and came up behind the high stack of mats, crouching. The stuffing inside them poofed out as the silencer sneezed again.

I scurried on hands and knees farther behind the mats and put my back against the wall, about middle ways, so I could see both ends of the stack and above. The way the light overhead was set, I could see her shadow fanning around on the floor. She was climbing at a crouch over the top of the mats and was going to be above me, shooting down.

I ducked to the left of the mats, so low I was almost duckwalking, moved as quietly and quickly as possible. I glanced back at her shadow as she rose out of her crouch and was near the edge of the mats, where she expected me to be.

I stepped out from the mats in a nice noiseless move that would have impressed a mouse, lifted the shotgun just as she realized she’d been snookered and was turning to find me. I shot up and hit her in the chest. She made a noise like I had punched her and went off the mat and hit the floor with a loud thump. I couldn’t see her, but I knew I had hit her good. I went around the edge of the mats and saw her lying on the floor on her back, her head propped against the wall. She still had the gun. Her face looked odd in the light. She way trying to figure who in the hell I was. Her brow was covered in sweat. Her lips were tightly clenched together. She was leaking blood all over the place. I could see where her sweatshirt had been ripped and riddled by the blast. She had her gun pointed at me. Her legs were spread out in front of her in a loose manner that made them seem as if they belonged to someone else, just borrowed for the occasion. She had a clear shot. I was about to cut down on her again, and then she lowered the gun. It lay across her lap. Her eyes were looking at me. It took me a moment before I realized she wasn’t seeing anything. I didn’t move for a brief moment, just stood there with my gun pointed at her. She had been an attractive kid.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s how it tumbles. That’s how it goes.”

I was startled to discover I was speaking out loud.

68

I went through the open doorway the woman had passed through and slinked along a wide corridor that was drop-dead dark at the end. I felt like I was walking into a gun barrel and someone was about to pull the trigger.

For a moment I thought about turning on my light, but figured I was outlined enough on my end without giving them a bull’s-eye. I went along nervous and listening. I wasn’t listening well enough, because there was movement to my right, and in that moment I realized there was an open doorway and someone was coming out of it. I turned and a shot flared the darkness, and in the flash of the gun, I saw a face.

It was Kincaid; in the brief flash of the gun he looked like a living mummy.

I swung the shotgun barrel around and caught him up alongside the head, heard his gun hit the floor and slide. But the next instant, he was twisting the barrel of the shotgun up, and it was coming out of my hands.

Moving in quick, I kicked him in the groin, and then we struggled over the shotgun. It came loose of both our hands and flew behind me and hit the wall and clattered to the floor.

Something winked in the dark and then I felt a smooth motion like the page of a book brushing across my hand, and then I felt the sting. I had been there before. A knife. I skipped backward, tried to get the pistol out of my pocket, but he was on me too fast. I made a kind of horseshoe bend as the knife passed in front of me. I felt it tug at my shirt and hit the edge of my coat as it flared wide. There was a noise as something hit the floor.

I was able to see better now, as my eyes had adjusted. I kicked the inside of his leg, and he went down on one knee. I gave him an uppercut to the chin, but he dodged it. The sonofabitch could see like an owl.

I reached in my coat pocket; it was wide open at the bottom. The knife had cut it at some point, and the damn revolver had fallen out, and that’s what I had heard hitting the floor. I was scuttling backward as he came, and finally I got the clasp knife out of my pocket and snapped it open.

Seeing well enough now, I slapped a stab aside by hitting his wrist, and cut down across his forearm. Or tried to. He slapped it down and brought his knife up, and I just moved in time to keep from catching it in the throat.

He sliced again, inward, and I parried it and cut down again, this time hitting him across the arm. He let out with a hissing sound, and kicked my feet out from under me. He leaped on top of me, and I caught his knife arm and locked my legs around him. I tried to stab him, but he had hold of my wrist.

I twisted so that my blade cut him. He let go and sprang off me and tried to cut my leg, but I avoided it and he kicked up at me. I felt the knife hit my shoe.

Now we were both on our feet again. He came slashing right and left, but keeping it tight. Filipino knife work was his game, and he was good at it. Better than me. I tried to take him with a straight stab, and he disarmed me, cutting the back of my hand in the process. Weaponless, I stepped back, and my foot came down on something, and I nearly slipped.

I knew what it was. The revolver. He lunged at me. I dropped down and his thrust went where I had been. I snatched up the revolver and tossed myself on my back and fired. The shot lit up the room, but it didn’t stop him. He came at me slashing. I scuttled backward. I fired again, and still he kept coming.

He leaped on me. I couldn’t get a shot off. His knife made a hard thunking noise, and then he quit moving. I crawled out from under him. His knife was stuck in the floor and he was lying facedown. I turned on my head beam and kicked him over on his back.

He had taken my shots, and I saw too that I had cut him more than I thought. He may have looked like a scarecrow, but he was tough. I kicked him in the ribs a couple of times to make sure he was dead.

He didn’t move. I turned to pick up the guns and the knife, and that’s when he jumped on my back.

His arm went around my throat and he started choking. It was a good choke. He was shutting off the arteries. I was about to go out. I pressed in on his elbow, pressing his arm tight to my neck, just the opposite of what you might think you should do. It opened enough space on the other side, though, that the blood started to flow and I started to regain my wits. I bent down and then sprang up, and he went over my hip. When he landed, I came down on top of him, straddling his chest, and I crashed my forearm into his throat.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

I could feel something give in his throat. He stopped struggling.

I still had my head beam on, and was still straddling him. He appeared to be a hundred years old, and at a glance skinny and weak. I knew better than that, though. He had been wiry and strong and skilled. I had been better. Or luckier.

I got up quickly and carefully. This time I wanted to be sure it was done. I found the revolver and put it in my belt, the knife in my pocket, picked up the shotgun without turning my back on Kincaid.

I went over and looked at him again.

In the light, I could see he was still breathing. He was alive still. He was a regular Rasputin.

I felt sorry for him for a moment, then I thought he was maybe the one who shot Leonard. Either him or his partner, the ex-wife.

I lifted up the shotgun and pointed it at his head, and let it go. You couldn’t have told much about how he had looked after that. The hallway stank of gunfire and blood.

I moved on through the dark toward the end of the hall, the headlight on, not worrying about it anymore. Whatever came, came.